What ‘good’ looks like?

I recently let slip that I had been warming to the view that ‘the UK’s broadband experiment has been going pretty well’.  This unnatural show of confidence seemed fully justified when Ofcom subsequently published its European Broadband Scorecard which cheerily claims that: 

“the UK leads the EU’s five biggest economies on most measures of coverage, take-up, usage and choice for both mobile and fixed broadband, and performs well on price”. 

But I should have recognized all this this euphoria as my moment of springtime madness, and I’m grateful to Ian Grant for restoring my sanity by flagging up the highly critical report by Digital Business First (DBF) on ‘The UK’s Enduring Broadband Deficit.  The conclusions of this analysis are indeed pretty damning, for example: 

 “Although the urge to rank the UK as highly as possible is understandable, it appears as though the manner in which Ofcom ranks UK broadband coverage is not credible, nor indeed realistic”. 

Ouch!  On its own terms, the report undoubtedly has much to deride in the UK government’s handling of broadband diffusion but, like the Ofcom report before it, those conclusions depend crucially on the authors’ chosen benchmarks of performance.  For Ofcom, it is the other four major European economies; for DBF, the more relevant metrics lie among Asian economies such as Hong Kong and Korea.  But if international benchmarks are so obviously treacherous, is there a better way of gauging the success of broadband policy? 

That was essentially the question posed to Blair Levin, the eminence grise of the American National Broadband Plan, in an interview last week with the Washington Post.  Levin concurred that international rankings are problematic ‘because they both cherry pick data and are backwards-looking’.  He suggested instead a 4-part test, expressed in typically folksy terms like this: 

“Are you driving fiber deeper?”

“Are you using spectrum more effectively?”

“Are you getting everybody on?”

“And are you using the platforms to deliver public goods more effectively?” 

Through this lens, the Scorecard for UK policy begins to look very different.  It fails miserably on 1 and 2; it does better on 3 but these people are evidently spending most of their time in social networking or home shopping because on 4, expressed in Ofcom’s terms as the ‘Percentage of population who interacted online with public authorities within the last 12 months’, the UK comes a lowly fourth out of five. 

Scepticism fully restored…